Nineteen Moons: A Residency Reflection
- Aug 18
- 10 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Artist in Residence with Ecstatic Dance Culture, The Bath House, Hackney Wick, November 2024 – May 2026
On 1 June 2026 — Moonday, the Monday after a rare Blue Moon — I performed my final VJ set at The Bath House, Hackney Wick. Nineteen events across eighteen months, one per full moon. This residency with Ecstatic Dance Culture deserves more than a quick caption and a grateful emoji. It deserves the full story.
How it began
I came to ecstatic dance through lockdown — through the sudden absence of all the things that had made life feel expansive. Live music. Raves. Festivals. That specific joy of being in a room full of strangers who, for a moment, are all part of the same thing. I missed it more than I expected.
One of my early dances was a socially distanced outdoor event in Hackney Wick, silent disco headphones, two metres apart in the mud. I showed up in wellies, too self-conscious to go barefoot. And across the dancefloor, I caught eyes with Kata Armitage — one of the co-founders of Ecstatic Dance Culture — in a moment of shared, slightly absurd delight. That glance became a friendship. And eventually, an invitation.
When Rose Robinson and Kata Armitage invited me to join their Women's Dance at The Bath House as the artist in residence, I didn't just say yes; it was a hell yeah.
The work
The format was consistent from night to night: women gathering, a DJ holding the music, my visuals projected onto the vast wall of The Bath House via a ceiling-mounted projector — and seventy-five minutes of movement, release, and collective presence. What changed, every single time, was everything inside that container.
Each moon began with a Pinterest board. I'd spend time gathering references — specific artists, historical imagery, aesthetic movements, symbolic languages — and use those boards to guide my prompting in MidJourney and Runway.
Researching image references
Prompting and iteration
Modular build of visuals and effects
What made this possible as a practice — the audio-reactive, live, performed element — was something I'd been searching for since my MA at Camberwell College of Arts. During my studies, I'd been reaching for exactly this: a way to create visuals that could respond to music in real time. But the tools I found then were either too expensive or required coding skills I didn't have. It was years later, through a conversation with an AI, that I found Magic Music Visuals — an affordable way into the practice I'd been trying to build since 2020. The residency was, among other things, the realisation of a creative intention that had been quietly waiting.
None of this arrived ready-made. And the structure of the residency meant there was no hiding from that: every month, a new moon, a new theme, a new visual language, a new set of technical problems to solve — and nineteen opportunities to do the next thing better than the last. Early on, I built a single animation for every track on the DJ's setlist — sometimes eighteen per event — until my laptop couldn't keep up and I had to find a different way. I learned to work in phases instead: four or five visual chapters following the energetic arc of the dance, each holding across several tracks. That structural shift gave me something I hadn't anticipated: freedom. When I was locked to individual tracks, I was stuck at the laptop for the full seventy-five minutes. I couldn't dance. I couldn't see what the work looked like from the other side of the room. The phase structure meant I could step away, get on the dancefloor, and experience — at least briefly — what I was creating for.
I also began to shape the wider environment of each event: the lighting, the placement of plants, the size of the dancefloor adjusted for the number of women in the room. I introduced flow arts props — veil fans and flags — in colours matched to that moon's visuals. Held back until the right lyrical moment, they became part of the piece: colour, fabric, and bodies moving in the same key. The projection was never the whole visual environment. It was one layer inside something larger.
Every VJ set from the residency is now available to watch on YouTube — the full playlist is linked here.
Here's a highlights edit across the residency.
The moments that stay
There were nineteen events, and each one lives somewhere in my body. Rather than walk through all of them, I want to pick out the moments that marked a shift — in the work, in the practice, in me.
March 2025 — Worm Moon
The Worm Moon was the first time I VJ'd — genuinely performing the visuals live, making decisions in real time rather than triggering a prepared video. Nothing quite prepares you for standing there for the first time, shaping what women see while they dance, knowing the choices you make are influencing — in some small way — what they feel. I was nervous and completely alive.
Not everything worked. But I knew I could do it, and I came back the following month and did it better.
June 2025 — Strawberry Moon
My relationship with improvisation evolved across the residency in stages. At first I needed the full tracklist in advance, building a prepared animation for each track — and even then, once the set arrived, I'd often find things that didn't work and spend time reworking and adjusting before and on the night.
Gradually I became comfortable not receiving all the tracks in a fixed order, finding my way through in the moment. The Strawberry Moon with DJ Our Echo was the next step. That shift — from prepared performance to improvisation — changed how I understood what I was doing. The visuals stopped being something I made for the dance and became something I made with it.
July 2025 — Buck Moon
This was the most personally demanding, and the most personally significant work of the entire residency. Before the event, I took a solo trip — Rye, Camber Sands, St Leonards, Eastbourne — extending day by day as I needed. I wasn't well. I needed time. On my period, fatigued, going properly inward, I used tarot cards and dreams to map my shadow masculine archetypes, then used AI to translate those into their healed counterparts — drawing on the Jungian framework of Moore and Gillette's King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. More than 800 images were generated. 150 made it into the final performance.
The visual narrative — descent, shadow, encounter, return — was inseparable from what I was living at the time. I have never made anything more personal.
August 2025 — Sturgeon Moon
This was where I ran headlong into one of the most interesting creative problems of the residency: trying to make AI-generated bodies move through water in a way that felt physically believable. The tool is very good at producing beautiful bodies. It is much less good at understanding how bodies actually move — the weight, the resistance, the particular way limbs trail through water.
Distorted hands, impossible joints, figures that dissolved rather than swam. These bloopers reveal something true about the uncanny space between digital bodies and physical ones.
May 2026 — Blue Moon (The Closing)
For the final moon, I built the visuals around the Crone archetype — elder feminine wisdom, the woman who has moved through fire and come out more fully herself. The portraits I created celebrated women who embody that quality: Grace Jones, Nina Simone, Iris Apfel, Yoko Ono, Vivienne Westwood, and DJ Sumirock — an 82-year-old Japanese DJ who began her career at 70 and has never stopped.
Women who became more themselves with age, not less. Women who refused to disappear. It felt like the right kind of ending.
On working with AI
I want to be honest about this, because it was central to the work and I think it deserves more than a list of tools.
I had never used AI image generation before this residency. Not once. This wasn't an extension of an existing practice — it was a genuine, sometimes bewildering, first encounter, learned month by month in front of a live audience.
The most honest thing I can say about what AI made possible is this: it made the volume achievable. Creating rich, complex, narrative visuals from scratch every single month — with that level of aesthetic range, that density of imagery — simply wouldn't have been possible otherwise. What AI gave me wasn't a shortcut; it was a shift in role. Instead of spending my time filming and composing and building the raw material, I could spend it curating, layering, sequencing, storytelling. I became an editor and a director as much as a maker. It allowed me to explore the full breadth of our visual culture — Art Deco, sacred geometry, cyberdelic psychedelia — and to bring something genuinely new and different to every moon. That creative freedom was the gift.
The process was never as simple as writing a prompt and taking what came back. The outputs were never used as-is. They were material — raw material that I directed, selected, animated, layered, and mixed live. The creative decisions were mine. The AI was the medium, not the author. I'm not an AI artist. I'm a multimedia artist who used AI as one material inside a much longer, stranger, more tactile process.
But I've also sat with harder questions. Early on, I noticed I kept generating similar figures — young, slim, conventionally attractive. The tool has defaults, and they are not neutral. Particularly for the Blue Moon, where the entire point was to honour women the culture routinely looks past, I had to work consciously against those defaults — counter-prompting deliberately for age, for different bodies, for women who don't fit the generative average. That labour felt important. It also felt like a symptom of something worth naming.
I think about the ecological cost too. Generative AI uses significant energy, and I used it extensively over eighteen months. I don't have a clean answer for that. What I can say is that I hold it as an open question rather than a settled one — something that will continue to shape how I work going forward.
What the Bath House gave us
There is something particular about returning to the same space nineteen times. At first I was making visuals for a room. By the end, I was making work for a room I knew intimately — its scale, its light, the way the projection landed on that specific wall, the acoustics, the quality of attention that the space seemed to draw out of people who walked into it. The Bath House became a creative collaborator in its own right.
I began this residency because I missed communal dance — the particular joy of being in a room with strangers who are all, for a moment, part of the same thing. What I didn't expect was to help build the very thing I'd been missing. Women came back month after month. Strangers became regulars. Regulars became part of the team. By the time of the first anniversary, the community wasn't something that had formed around the dance — it had become the dance.
As a moving image artist, I've spent years trying to find the right context for this work. Gallery settings are conscious, but attention is short — people don't tend to sit with a seventy-five-minute moving image work the way they might sit with a painting. Festivals and raves are immersive but scattered — too much is happening in every direction, and genuine presence is harder to find. What the ecstatic dance space gave me was something I hadn't fully expected: seventy-five minutes of people's full, undivided attention, in the dark, with bodies moving. That is cinematic. As a context for audio-visual storytelling, it is genuinely rare, and I am grateful to have had it.
A dancer told me after one set: "Those visuals will stay with me for a long time. I needed to see them — they made me want to be a different version of myself." That is what I make art for.
What Remains
This residency gave me a space to express — creatively, physically, communally — inside a container held by two women who gave me full creative licence and treated me as a collaborator from the beginning. Rose and Kata have become close friends. We hold each other across joy and grief and everything in between. That is not something I anticipated when I said yes to the first dance.
Earlier this year, I stood on a stage at Old Sessions House and told this story out loud for the first time — the descent, the dance spaces that caught me, the art that gave me a language for what I couldn't yet say in words — you can read that reflection here.
Ecstatic Dance Culture has since moved to a new home, and I celebrate that with them. I remain part of the team, though my creative chapter at The Bath House was its own complete thing — and I'm letting it be that, rather than rushing toward whatever comes next.
What is already beginning: I'm working with my sister, Sasha Jacques, on a series of visual journeys for sound healing experiences — pairing visuals from the residency archive with new footage, each piece built around one of the five elements and its corresponding frequencies. She has recorded the sound healings using instruments, voice and mantra. I've created the visual counterpart. It's a different kind of collaboration, and a different kind of making — quieter, more intimate, rooted in something ancient rather than something generated. It feels like the right next step.
And there is something else I'm holding space for — a different kind of event entirely: mixed-gender, fully immersive, a space where the visuals are not backdrop but co-creator, where the screens surround you rather than face you. The residency has taught me exactly what's possible when an audience gives itself fully to image and music and movement together. I want to find out what happens when the room itself becomes the canvas. That space hasn't materialised yet. But I know what I'm looking for now, and that is its own kind of readiness.
Looking back, I can see the arc of the Heroine's journey: the descent, the underworld, the slow and non-linear return, the bringing back of something hard-won. I didn't plan it that way. But eighteen moons of making in public has a way of showing you who you are.
Thank you
Thank you to Rose Robinson and Kata Armitage of Ecstatic Dance Culture — for your trust, your friendship, your non-hierarchical warmth, and the creative licence you gave me from the very beginning.
Thank you to the DJs who held the music across nineteen moons: Rose Robinson (Tigerbalm), Kata Armitage, Natalie K Marsland, Our Echo, and Gaia.
Thank you to the wider EDC team — the women who set up the altar, held the creative corner, welcomed every person at the door, and made each event feel like a cared-for space. The dance was yours too.
And thank you to every woman who showed up, took off her shoes, and moved.
The Bath House, Hackney Wick. November 2024 – May 2026.
Want more?
🎥 Watch the full residency VJ playlist on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk804OjwZUk&list=PLhbIKUr5PP5fme_LTnKoxisiPx7udYflO
📖 Read the Buck Moon reflection → djartworks.com/post/buck-moon-ecstatic-dance-culture-the-bath-house-july-2025
📖 Read the RAW Storytelling reflection → djartworks.com/post/passion-as-presence-ecstatic-dance-culture-raw-storytelling-february-2026
📖 Read the Studying Somatics interview → djartworks.com/post/interview-ecstatic-dance-art-community
💌 Interested in collaborating? → djartworks.com/contact
